Local agent launches campaign to warn public about ‘rife’ portal juggling

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An agent has launched a campaign warning the public about portal juggling, which he said is now rife in the industry.

He has done so after friends were caught out after having had their hopes built up by what turned out to be a fake listing by a local high street agent.

The property they were interested in was originally listed in June. It was then listed as new last week, but a day later it was listed as new again but under offer.

David Mintz, director of Normie & Company in north Manchester, said juggling is “rife” and being practised by local agents in many parts of the country.

He called on the industry to “get a grip and start cleaning up its act”.

He added: “It has become so prevalent and the use of statistics by agents in order to win business has become the norm, that we cannot forget that these practices have a human element to them and it is the public themselves that ultimately pay the price.”

Mintz has written a blog on his firm’s website, plus an explanatory video.

In the blog, he said that an un-named local competitor listed the property last week, apparently as new.

Friends contacted him to ask his opinion about the property, and the prospects for the sale of their own property.

After much discussion, Mintz recommended his friends to contact the other agent to arrange a viewing.

However, before they could do so, the next morning they found the property had been re-listed as new, but this time marked ‘under offer’.

Mintz’s friends contacted the agent to be told that the property had in fact had a sale agreed on it for many weeks.

Mintz writes: “It’s frustrating, but these people had become the victims of portal juggling.

“Ever notice an agent listing stock as ‘listed today’ and simultaneously ‘Sold STC’? This might give you the impression that the agent has sold the property overnight. In some circumstances it causes buyers to think that they have to pay the full asking price in order to secure a property as they are flying off the shelves so quickly.

“In fact the truth is that these are old listings. They’ve been under offer or sold for weeks, if not months, and the agent is trying to mislead you.

“We can all manipulate the data that Rightmove and Zoopla provide to agents as a tool to win instructions, but at what cost?

“Further mistrust and the denigration of our profession by the public.

“It’s unfortunate that the unscrupulous and under-handed tactics of a few dishonest agents tar the majority of honest agents with the same brush.”

Mintz adds: “In the month of November and December there have been several instances of portal juggling in north Manchester in Prestwich, Whitefield and Salford by at least one well established agent. It’s not right and it needs to stop.”

Mintz urges members of the public who detect portal juggling to contact the industry regulator, NTSEAT.

Isn’t it time the major portals started putting explanations and warnings about PJ on their sites. After all …it is their user’s experience they are protecting. They should have a ‘report suspected juggle’ button on each listing. That surely would cut the practice down.

Strange how the closer it gets to Christmas the more idealistic world I start to think we might live in. Of course disillusionment is always just around the corner.

Quite simple, report the users and abusers….it will be investigated slowly by Rightmove, but it will be investigated. With it happening in so many areas, they can’t keep pace; you are the expert in your area, do a little self policing. I know it is boring, but you need to protect your identity and market share. I flagged a local firm near me who did this with over 40 properties in 1 day! Rightmove say the agent claims they changed their property software so had to reload, which is nonsense as there are other properties that go back to the beginning of the year, so I’m impressed there is selective software available in the market. Their card is marked however…..and so is yours Rightmove!

You wonder why agents have a bad wrap at the moment…its all self inflicted and rest assured, the public don’t need to be given much leeway in an online world and ‘click button for disatisfaction’ to voice their outrage.

“…the agent claims they changed their property software so had to reload, which is nonsense as there are other properties that go back to the beginning of the year, so I’m impressed there is selective software available in the market.”

Yeah – funny you should mention that, P-Daddy. I’m currently having a very close look at a company that apparently uses this “selective software”…

I relation to reporting users and abusers, I’m currently Tweeting properties with ‘unusual activity’ direct to Rightmove. Yesterday, I asked them publicly whether anyone was actually reading these Tweets… and the following response – from @RightmovePro – was received:

“Hi there – yes, all the properties flagged up to this account get passed on to our Data Quality team for review”

Churchill most famously said

“…whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills…”

I say we’re fighting a great fight, right here on EYE!

Social media isn’t a bad place to kick up a stink either – but always tag @PropIndEye in!

Well said PeeBee. Make sure you go direct the quality control as well, you WILL get an answer and feedback and shows it is a serious complaint. Dataquality Dataquality@Rightmove.co.uk

Remember, the portals need accurate data, when they report to the Stock Market, active properties and market share are just as important to them for accuracy. Imagine what would happen to their integrity and share price if the city thought the number of houses for sale and rent were inaccurate….. and they weren’t policing it correctly!! This will answer some of the following questions posed by Undercover agent

A great piece of work by David. Unfortunately though i feel there are 2 massive obstacles we, as genuine agents face. Firstly overall, the general public are not interested in the subject of portal juggling, even when having it explained to them, most don’t see the issue. B) The major portals, for all their rhetoric, also don’t seem that interested.

The bodies that govern our industry, need to step up here and rather than just chat away at conferences, punish those that do this.

I hate to say, there is a way to have the portals take note and see how they deal with it……

For every portal juggle in your area, portal juggle 2 back at em….. I know I know, 2 wrongs don’t make a right bla bla….

So when RM and alike finally get a bit fed up that their data is bonkers and they do try and do what some fear “take it out on the smaller firms”, we then have a straight forward case of “discrimination” for treating one client differently to another and raise a whole new case.

So, let the “JuggleWars” begin…..

Oh and RM, you could also, simply change your software to not trigger a “newly listed” date when a sale falls through and simply show the original listing date! That’s one of the problems which RM cause as their system is actually wrong, I had a fall through recently, resold next day – looked like a portal juggle…. I even phoned RM to tell em it was genuine!

Can you explain further Chrispy. Does this mean you can juggle as many times as you want in the 14 week window, but not after that (like a juggle ‘Purge’) …or you have to have at least 14 weeks between each juggle?

Makes no difference Agent V – Increasing to 14 weeks. – Some companies list multi cards of the same property.

I think what is being missed here with portal juggling is its not your local competitor trying to get a property to the top of the listings (as annoying as that is)

*** PLEASE READ ***

The reason some companies “Portal Juggling” is to inflate their stock levels so they can show they are NUMBER 1 in an area so they gain more instructions on valuation or they can say to investors they are taking on hundreds if not thousands a month meaning they are a good investment.

If you uploaded 10 properties every night for a month at 12:01am and took them off at 06:59am same day. End of the month you will be showing you have took on close to 300 properties AND sold them. This will also be verified by the portal.

This would help any high street office let alone a national brand – This is what portal juggling is, NOT the agent next door that manipulates the system on a small scale.

Before this comment gets removed i have not highlighted who may or may not do this this is purely about portal juggling NOT who is doing it.

Exactly. They are not agents and tar the names of those who do a good job. It’s also the fake and phantom listings dodgy agents put up to pretend to have ‘market share’… the ones with pictures of a random building, the local bus stop, a coffee shop but not the actual property they are ‘supposed’ to sell. These are the ones we need to name and shame…

Morning Agent of “integrity” get your facts right. Normie & Co publicly declared that they were switching their systems over to a new system and this was unavoidable. We put trading standards and Robert May on notice that this was happening.

Bottom line is the agent in question is a cheap agent so in theory no better than an online call centre agent. SO why expect anymore from them other than the same games that the online companies play. Cheap tricks by a cheap company. Mr “Half a %”

With so many service suppliers it isn’t fair to blame everything on either the portals , the agents or the service suppliers so we look at everything prior to an event and everything after to see what affects a particular event has.

The switch to Dezrez by Normie was a notified event, we have seen expected listing changes and unexpected anomalies, they are being investigated.

I also think someone should make it clear to home owners that the low fees offered by on line agents is subject to them using their conveyance services, which is then massively inflated to generate the profit.

There should be transparency in the fees agents offer vendors. If you charge 1% or 1.5% or 2% plus VAT is it subject to other charges or conditions. If you charge £500, £700 or £1,000 plus VAT is this also subject to other charges or conditions.

We charge £xxxx plus VAT no sale no fee. We charge x% plus VAT no sale no fee or we charge £*** plus VAT subject to our terms and conditions- which should be in the same type face and size as everything else.

As someone that sells in this area i presume you are talking about X ? Ive had my suspicions about them for the last couple of years, ive seen loads of properties come on by them late at night and then go under offer by the morning. Disgusting.

NTSEAT are taking actions, aren’t they? Not a hope of getting to grips, as it is so rife and many man hours they do not have. I blame the web portals for allowing it to happen, they know who is doing it and have always said they would take action … that was a joke! This can be nipped in the bud every quickly … OFT have the power to enforce the web portals,… where are you OFT.

If you look at Lettings in London then Portal Juggling is rife. In one London Postcode I looked at 144 agents with more than one listing 98 agents their was evidence of portal juggling. This included some big names.

In the same area I took a sample of properties with an EPC showing 70% had no EPC

NTSEAT only investigate Estate Agency not Lettings as they only have powers under the Estate Agents Act 1979. ARLA only take action against an agent once enforcement action takes place and the property ombudsman would only look into if I was a member.

The only people who have any authority are local trading standards and it would appear they do nothing. With no one to enforce the law it would appear no one takes any notice of it.

I just wonder if there are many agents out there oblivious to the fact that PJ is illegal, and still see it as a legitimate way of boosting interest in their flagging properties.

The portals need to issue a directive to every agent stating that the practice is condemned, and anyone caught doing it will be penalised. If they did, and continued to state it on a continuous basis, we would know categorically that they were serious about tackling the issue!

The first part is easy, many haven’t a clue its illegal. The second was done by RM over a year ago who promised to stamp it out, lol. It was recently circulated by TPO or was I dreaming? No-one has an excuse for portal jugging other than to impress fraudulently.

‘New 14-week time period to relaunch listings on Rightmove and in property alerts

We are constantly making improvements to the technology that’s used to upload your listings on to Rightmove.

The latest update to our technology extends the time period that a property can be relaunched as a new instruction, increasing it from two weeks to 14 weeks.

Why are we doing this?
We’ve made this change after a number of discussions with agents and with other organisations in the industry. This step will help ensure that home-hunters are seeing the most accurate listings when searching on Rightmove.

The change will also further improve the accuracy of your market share data and rankings against your competitors in Rightmove Intel.

What does this mean?

· If you have a property for sale that you take off Rightmove and put it back on within 14 weeks, it will display as usual but will keep the original listing date and will not go out in property alerts

· If it has been longer than 14 weeks since the property was last listed, it will relaunch, the listing date will be updated and it will be sent out in property alerts
The change to the time period will affect properties uploaded through agency software and those that are uploaded manually using Rightmove Admin.

What else have we done?
We’ve made improvements to the technology we use to more accurately detect relisted properties. This also means that the process will be smoother if you choose to change your software provider that automatically sends your listings to Rightmove via a data feed.

These changes sit alongside the technology and processes that are already in place to remove hundreds of thousands of properties each year that have been sold or let.

Rightmove Director Jason Bushby explains:“After listening to and reviewing feedback from around the industry we have made the change to 14 weeks to provide users with the most accurate data when they are making property decisions. This will help to prevent any agents who may be deliberately trying to incorrectly relaunch listings and we will be continuing to improve, update and review this technology.”

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